The present invention relates generally to the field of web content management, and more particularly to web content management using predetermined project templates. A web content management system (hereinafter “WCMS”) is software that is used to create, modify, and publish content for a website. In a WCMS, the layout and design elements of a website are managed separately from its content. This allows a user to change the layout and design of a web page without changing the content, and change the content without having to update the layout and design. A website may consist of one or more web pages. A website that consists of multiple web pages has a hierarchy wherein a web page at a higher level in the web hierarchy is referred to as a parent web page and web pages that are linked below it are child web pages.
In a WCMS, the design and layout of a website are separated from its displayed content, which allow content to be created for a website without having to understand how to build a website. When a new web page with new content is being created or modified the changes are typically done as drafts and grouped via a container, usually called workspace or project. Projects allow a user to change a set of web content items on a web page or website, have them reviewed and previewed together and ensure that they are published together at the same time. Currently, when a user creates a new project they need to set a number of related properties associated with the project, such as the list of approvers, the actions to be executed, and how the project is going to be published. In order to avoid entering these properties for each new project they can be pre-set in a project template that then can be used to create a new project with the pre-set properties filled in from the project template.
Larger websites can have many different project templates, because each part of the website contains web content items that require different review processes and different sets of approvers. Hence, for large websites, there could potentially be many projects templates that an author has to navigate through (and potentially review) in order to select the correct one for the type of changes and the area of the website being modified.